A People's History of Scotland

by Chris Bambery

  Kevin Williamson founded the magazine Rebel Inc in 1992, and argued that the period between then and the creation of a Scottish parliament in 1999 was ‘the making of Scotland’. He launched the magazine on May Day 1992, just nine days after John Major’s surprise general election victory, upstairs in a leading Edinburgh bookshop. He recalled, ‘we had the bit between our teeth and we fought back.’

  The backlash that followed was inevitable. He was invited onto BBC Radio Scotland’s lunchtime arts show to defend himself against accusations of bad language, violence, filth and depravity. On that day technicians were on strike, and Kevin seized the moment when the presenter asked:

  ‘So, Kevin, how do you defend your publication?’

  ‘Well, Colin [Bell], I’d like to defend the magazine but as a trade unionist myself I’m going down to join the BECTU picket line outside’.74

  It is easy to portray the cultural upsurge of the 1980s and ’90s as simply a response to Thatcherism, but its roots were a lot deeper, and preceded the 1979 Westminster election. Alasdair Gray, Jeff Torrington and James Kelman wrote for more than a decade before finally having their books published in Scotland and England. Tom Leonard’s The Good Thief appeared in the first issue of Scottish International in January 1968, but when he had tried to publish poems in Glasgow University Magazine the printer refused them because of the language. Later a typesetter wanted ‘foreign language rates’ for setting some of his poems. Kelman had been writing since about 1967 but his first collection of short stories, An Old Pub Near the Angel, was published only in 1973 in the USA and received little notice in Scotland or England.

  Scottish International appeared between 1968 and 1974 and became a platform for these new writers. It published extracts from Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, helping him secure a Scottish Arts Council grant to complete it. SI also published Alan Spence’s stories. Its editor was Harry Tait, while two poets, Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch, were members of its editorial board.

  Lanark is, simply, a masterpiece. Gray’s book is set in two places: the Glasgow where he grew up and lives, and the strange dystopian world of Unthank, a grey, oppressive place where Lanark, his hero, is trapped by emotional repression. Gray sees the novel, and much of his other writing, as an exploration of the ability of human beings to love and of the obstacles that inhibit that capacity.

  Meanwhile, radical theatre came to Scotland in the 1970s when, for example, Billy Connolly starred in The Great Northern Welly Boot Show, based loosely on the UCS sit-in. The 7:84 theatre company had been set up in London in 1971, involving, among others, John McGrath, Elizabeth MacLennan and David MacLeanan (the title came from an Economist article that said just 7 percent of Britain’s population owned 84 percent of the wealth), and in 1973 they formed 7:84 Scotland.

  That year they took The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil on a tour of Scotland, travelling in a Transit van across the country. It was a rousing attack on the Clearances and much else. McGrath recalls that on its first performance they were ‘staggered to see an Aberdeen audience stand up and cheer at the end’.75 They moved on to the Highlands, performing in village halls and with a ceildh at the end of each show.

  Their next play was The Game’s a Bogey, centring on the figure of John Maclean. It opened at a miner’s welfare club in Glenrothes and toured industrial Scotland, bringing Maclean to a whole new audience.76 The Scottish TUC sponsored their later shows, as they did concerts of the Laggan, the left-wing folk group featuring the powerful voice of Arthur Johnstone.

  Subsequently, what was most remarkable in all this was the sheer volume of first-class writing that came forth. Alasdair Gray and James Kelman met each other, and Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead, for the first time in 1971 at a writers’ group organised by Philip Hobsbaum, a lecturer in English at Glasgow University. What was equally remarkable was that the majority of this new writing reflected working-class experience and used everyday language, as spoken by ordinary Scots. James Kelman explains why:

  The establishment demands art from its own perspective but these forms of committed art have always been as suffocating to me as the impositions laid down by the British State, although I should point out of course that I am a socialist myself. I wanted none of any of it … How could I write from within my own place and time if I was forced to adopt the received language of the ruling class? Not to challenge the rules of narrative was to be coerced into assimilation, I would be forced to write in the voice of an imagined member of the ruling class. I saw the struggle as towards a selfcontained world. This meant I had to work my way through language, find a way of making it my own.77

  At the beginning of the 1980s, Peter Kravitz was working at the publisher Polygon. He recalled that if you asked about Scottish fiction in a bookshop you would be directed to historical romances. Publishers and bodies such as the Scottish Arts Council had little interest in encouraging new writers dealing with contemporary Scotland:

  When on behalf of Polygon I sent them [James] Kelman’s second novel, A Chancer, they deemed it unworthy of a grant towards publication costs. They had received a complaint from a Conservative Member of Parliament, Alick Buchanan-Smith; one of his constituents had picked up Kelman’s previous novel, The Busconductor Hines, in an Edinburgh bookshop, and was shocked that taxpayers’ money was subsidising such language. Those who claimed to represent culture had lost their collective nerve.78

  In December 1990, the Scots Magazine – a favourite read among Scots abroad – published an article by Maurice Fleming entitled ‘Scotland the Depraved’. In it he called for a return to the values of the comic classics of Compton Mackenzie and more publicity for writers who could celebrate Scotland as opposed to those he labelled ‘the terrible twosome’: Kelman and Irvine Welsh, joined by Duncan McLean. He describes his targets as ‘desperate to plumb even deeper depths of depravity’. These writers, he said, ‘appear to view Scotland with undisguised and malicious disgust [portraying the place as] a nation of drunks, drug addicts and dropouts’.79

  In 1992, the tabloid Daily Record ran a story under the headline ‘Sex Shockers on School’s Reading List’, claiming ‘dirty books’ and ‘classroom porn shockers’ were in the library at Johnstone High School. As a result, five books were taken off the shelves: A Chancer and Greyhound for Breakfast by James Kelman; The Color Purple by Alice Walker; The Cider House Rules by John Irving; and Perfume by Patrick Süskind. Strathclyde Region’s Director of Education then ordered all post-1970 fiction to be removed and vetted.80

  Kelman’s first published novel, The Busconductor Hines, did not reach the prestigious Booker Prize shortlist. However, Richard Cobb (the chairman of the judges) did express his shock that ‘one of the novels seemed to be written entirely in Glaswegian’, as if that were enough to pass judgement on it. Anne Smith, editor of the (then Edinburgh-based) Literary Review, said of it, ‘Who wants to read 300 pages about the life of a bus conductor where nothing much happens anyway?’81

  Kelman’s novel How Late It Was, How Late, published in 1994, was awarded the Booker Prize. The judges’ decision was not unanimous, with Rabbi Julia Neuberger calling the decision a ‘disgrace’.82 She added it was ‘just a drunken Scotsman railing against bureaucracy’. The English journalist Simon Jenkins described the author as an ‘illiterate savage’.83

  In his acceptance speech Kelman riposted:

  There is a literary tradition to which I hope my own work belongs. I see it as part of a much wider process – or movement – toward decolonization and self-determination: it is a tradition that assumes two things: 1) The validity of indigenous culture; and 2) The right to defend it in the face of attack. It is a tradition premised on a rejection of the cultural values of imperial or colonial authority, offering a defence against cultural assimilation, in particular imposed assimilation. Unfortunately, when people assert their right to cultural or linguistic freedom they are accused of being ungracious, parochial, insular, xenophobic, racist etc.84

  In response to similar c
ritics of such uncouth language, Tom Leonard wrote:

  right enuff

  ma language is disgraceful

  ach well

  all livin language is sacred

  fuck thi lohta thim

  But not everyone followed this lead in writing in the vernacular. The Edinburgh-based crime writer Ian Rankin has said how impressed he was by Kelman’s use of Scottish vernacular and how he enthusiastically showed Kelman’s stories to his father. ‘But he said he couldn’t read it because it wasn’t in English. Now, my dad is from the same working-class linguistic community as Kelman writes about. If he couldn’t read it, but half of Hampstead was lapping it up, that to me was a huge failure and I decided then not to write phonetically.’85

  The poet and playwright Liz Lochhead has also raised another issue: ‘I do like Glasgow and the West of Scotland register, but that’s only because its part of my own childhood and private register that I know intimately. I am certainly interested in Scottishness, but I feel that the territory that gets delineated is a macho William McIlvanney and Tom Leonard world and that’s what Glasgowness feeds into.’86

  But Lochhead did write, in Lallans:

  It took me a long while to gain the courage to write in Scots, and the desire. Why’s that? You can start to psychoanalyse yourself trying to answer that. But you’d be better off interrogating the Education System. ‘Kidspoem’ was a commission; the idea was to encourage kids to write in their ‘home town’ language. So I thought back to my own childhood, and remembered the words I still used, built a translation into the structure. Had fun …87

  Leonard’s Radical Renfrew was published in 1990, and he explains how he came to write it: ‘While I was working in Paisley Central Library I saw behind the counter the local nineteenth century collection which no one had ever read and I wanted to read it. I thought that if there wasn’t an anthology, I would make one, so I just read the collection and made an anthology from it … I had a distinct sense of audience: the audience would be the people who used the library.’ In the introduction Leonard states that libraries are crucial to democracy.88

  James Kelman is not just a novelist but a political activist, as reflected in collections of essays. In the 1980s, Kelman was part of the Workers’ City group, which challenged Glasgow’s designation as the 1990 European City of Culture. This was critical of the free-market ethos behind the festival, and the name was chosen in contrast to the renaming of part of the city centre as the Merchant City, something they said promoted the ‘fallacy that Glasgow somehow exists because of … eighteenth century entrepreneurs and far-sighted politicians. [The merchants] were men who trafficked in degradation, causing untold misery, death and starvation to thousands.’89 Subsequently, Kelman worked for Clydeside Action on Asbestos, fighting on behalf of victims of asbestosis refused compensation from contractors and local authorities.

  Kelman, Gray, Leonard and Lochhead are very firmly West Coast writers. But the writer who gained the greatest international attention came from the other side of the country. Irvine Welsh was born in Leith in 1961, before moving with his family at the age of four to Muirhouse, one of the many post-war council schemes that ring Edinburgh. Leaving school at sixteen, he worked in various jobs before leaving for London in 1978 to join the city’s punk scene before getting a job with Hackney Council and then returning to Edinburgh to study at Heriot-Watt University.

  He has written fondly of his visits to his aunt and uncle’s family in Southall in West London, as it began to be transformed into one of the centres of Britain’s Asian community, and of his subsequent time living in London in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There is no petty nationalism here. Welsh, like Kelman, Leonard and other Scottish writers, has no animosity towards the English and clearly had good times in London.

  Welsh published various stories in literary magazines. The first parts of what would become Trainspotting appeared in his friend Kevin Williamson’s Rebel Inc, and as a result, in 1993 the book was published in London. A stage adaptation opened at Glasgow’s Mayfest a year later, went on to the Edinburgh Festival and to tour the US. In February 1996, Danny Boyle’s film adaptation premiered, and Welsh enjoyed international fame of a sort few Scottish writers have achieved.

  Trainspotting depicts a very different side of life in Edinburgh than was normally the case. As Welsh explained: ‘That image was a lie: it was at best just a small constituent part of the culture of that city. That of the middle class festival city. Yet it had a hegemony over all the other images of this urban, largely working class but multicultural city. Other realities existed, had to be shown to exist.’90

  Memorably, the anti-hero Renton gets to say these words:

  Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars. Choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pish and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life. Well ah choose nae to choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, its their fuckin problem.91

  When Renton pays a visit to his dealer, he describes in passing the general economic stasis that now describes the landscape of Muir-house: ‘Ah cross the dual carriageway and walk through the centre. Ah pass the steel-shuttered units which have never been let and cross over the car park where cars have never parked. Never since it was built. Over twenty years ago.’92 This is a long way from the kailyard.

  Renton chooses to be a supporter of Hibs (like Welsh), the team founded by Edinburgh’s Catholic community, rather than Hearts, the Protestant team his brother Billy supports. In that way Renton and his pals are outsiders: Hearts have the bigger support and have been generally more successful. He and his pals are abused as ‘Fenian cunts’. The choice is a rejection of Edinburgh’s dominant Presbyterian culture, and that particular sense of Scottishness.

  Billy joins the British Army and is killed in Northern Ireland. In the book Renton’s grief will reappear but at the funeral his anger is on display, reinforced by the attendance of relatives from Glasgow, clearly Rangers supporters:

  Ah cannae feel remorse, only anger and contempt. Ah seethed when ah saw that fuckin Union Jack oan his coffin, n watched that smarmy, wimpy cunt ay an officer, obviously oot ay his depth here, trying tae talk tae ma Ma. Worse still, these Glasgow cunts, the auld boy’s side, are through here en masse. They’re fill ay shite aboot how he died in the service ay his country n aw that servile Hun crap.93

  Welsh lists George Eliot, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as writers he admires, along with Walter Scott, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and James Hogg, whose 1824 Confessions of a Justified Sinner he describes as ‘one of the best, most brilliant books ever written’. Of more recent Scottish writers, he says that reading James Kelman’s The Busconductor Hines was a key moment (‘Kelman was like Year Zero’), and of William McIlvanney’s Docherty, ‘this is a fucking great writer writing in his own voice, and it’s like James Kelman, to me, is doing that but just taking it one stage further. And Alasdair Gray’s taking it off in another direction.’94 But he also draws a line between the West Coast writers and himself: ‘A lot of the Glasgow writers are concerned with work and the alienation from work … Because of the industry in Glasgow there is a kind of machismo about work – that dignity of labour thing … I think work is a horrible thing. People should avoid it at all costs.’95

  The author pinpoints the change that took place in Scotland during the Thatcher and John Major years:

  Like many Scots, I grew up saturated in something I assumed to be ‘Britishness’, and I loved it. Steptoe and Son, The Likely Lads, Play for Today, they were my cultural staples, and I was personally liberated by the welfare state, specifically the Butler Education Act. This meant that my college fees would be paid in full by the state, and I would also receive a full grant, which amounted to 2/3rds of my dad’s wages. Now all that has gone …96

  A
lasdair Gray points to one reason crime fiction has taken off in Scotland in recent years: ‘It’s only been in the last twenty years that you have an awful lot of Scottish popular detective thrillers with Scottish settings and Scottish detectives and criminals. If you leave aside John Buchan, Scotland just wasn’t interesting enough to have that kind of thing for most of the last century.’97

  Topping the best-seller list for crime fiction is Ian Rankin, whose books are set in his adopted home, Edinburgh, and his native Fife (Rankin was born in Cardenden in the old coalfield).

  These writers, in their different ways, have cut a path that others are following today. Rab Wilson worked as miner in his native Ayrshire and in his poetry has continued to use Lallans in the new century, explaining, ‘There is still a working class voice out there, but the powers that be don’t want to publish it.’98

  Reflecting on the damage done to working-class communities like his own in New Cumnock, he adds: ‘The human spirit will always survive – if it can survive Auschwitz, it can survive call centres and Tesco. The problem is that modern work is so full on – it’s not like Robert Burns working on a farm, when you had time to think. But maybe stacking shelves in Tesco is quite a conducive environment to be a poet. In fact, now that you mention it, I think I’ll volunteer myself to work in Tesco for six months as their poet in residence.’

  In 1985, Alexander Moffatt, head of painting at Glasgow School of Art, staged the exhibition New Image, featuring six ‘Glasgow Boys’, most of whom had been his pupils – Ken Currie, Peter Howson, Steven Campbell, Stephen Barclay, Stephen Conroy and Adrian Wiszniewski. (The original Glasgow Boys came to promininence in the 1880s and ’90s and included James Guthrie, Arthur Melville, Joseph Crawhall, E. A. Walton, George Henry, John Lavery and E. A. Hornel. They were painting at a time when the city was at the peak of its prosperity.) Currie’s In the City Bar was first shown in 1987, in the build-up to Glasgow being the 1990 European City of Culture. On its left a loyalist group are holding back a man in a vest, one of them with a Union Jack tattooed on his arm, while behind them a couple dance cheerlessly to a tartanclad accordion player and a drummer99 with the Stars and Stripes on his drum, a reference to the hold of a bastardised American culture. Off to the right an elderly worker downs another pint while Currie paints himself rolling up various plans for the future. But while he tarries in the bar a young girl strides purposely towards the door, and the future.